A shopkeeper dressed as an Apple store employee looks out from a window of a shop masquerading as a bona fide Apple store in downtown Kunming, in southwest China's Yunnan province. Photograph: AP

A fascinating discovery by 27-year-old American abirdabroad, who works for a public health organisation in the rapidly developing city of Kunming, southern China. After a few months away, she knew her neighbourhood would have changed pretty fast and she was right, with three Starbucks, an H&M and, seemingly, three Apple stores popping up while she was away.

One of three fake Apple stores in Kunming, China. Photo:
birdabroad, used with permission

Grey slate floors, steel staircases, wood benches and staff in branded blue t-shirts. Everything appears routinely Apple. But look more closely and some of the branding is a little off (Apple doesn't write 'Apple Stoer' [sic] under its logo) and the staff badges didn't have individual names. Those staff did, after a little gentle interrogation, appear to think they were working for the real Apple. But otherwise an astonishing piece of extreme bootlegging.

Our intrepid blogger was suspicious; although Kunming is typical of China's rapid development it is relatively remote. She looked up Apple's official China site and lo - Apple has only four stores in China, two of which are in Beijing and two in Shanghai.

"Being the curious types that we are, we struck up some conversation with these salespeople who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple," she wrote.

"I tried to imagine the training that they went to when they were hired, in which they were pitched some big speech about how they were working for this innovative, global company – when really they're just filling the pockets of some shyster living in a prefab mansion outside the city by standing around a fake store disinterestedly selling what may or may not be actual Apple products that fell off the back of a truck somewhere."

That's an interesting point - whether the owners of this store had wholesaled genuine Apple products or, as seems more likely, were selling fake products too. Either way you can be sure that Apple's brand protection team is already rolling out the big guns. This fake Apple store clearly took a significant investment, which means there must be serious money to be made by trading off the Apple brand. And Apple will expect to reap every penny of that itself. After all, it has those sky-rocketing revenues to protect.

• Update:The Wall Street Journal has managed to speak to one of the store employees by phone, who said they are aware that the store isn't official but that the products are authentic. "It doesn't make much of a difference for us whether we're authorised or not," he said. "I just care that what I sell every day are authentic Apple products, and that our customers don't come back to me to complain about the quality of the products." WSJ suggested that the store could apply to become an authorised reseller, but it's questionable whether Apple would grant that given such a flagrant attempt to pass itself off as the genuine thing.

• We asked Apple for any comment on whether it had started investigating these stores: it declined to comment.

• Another update: the BBC has reported that authorities have moved to shut some fake Apple stores down.